“We don’t have the bourgeoisie we used to have” regrets Antoni Serra Ramoneda at the Institute of Catalan Studies. The former president of Caixa Catalunya was ousted by the socialists who wanted to launder Narcis Serra of his Gal State terrorism. What dirty laundering! Absorbed by Catalunya Caixa and auctioned off. His conference explained why saving banks have disappeared.

Obviously because of the real estate bubble, fueled by the political and financial wizards: “Saving banks had the know-how for mortgages. With the building boom saving banks grew massively. The mistake was to give credits to developers. If they had stuck to credits for buyers, saving banks would not have collapsed with the crisis. Competition between saving banks was so strong that to enter a new neighborhood or town they joined up with a developer and financed him in exchange for passing on the mortgage to the buyers. This way the new branch had 200 customers for life because mortgages were difficult to change. The developer actually put very little money and if he couldn’t pay he gave back the property, something so fashionable now. Saving banks had no choice but to take over the land or the buildings because they could not go after limited liability companies the same way they attached wages. Saving banks participated in the bubble because if they waited for the end customer, they found that the buyer had already a mortgage from a competitor.” Citizens are now paying the bubble created by saving banks with promoters. Only La Caixa avoided falling into the trap, perhaps because it already had so many branches and didn’t need to expand so fast. La Caixa had invested in large service companies such as Gas Natural, Aguas de Barcelona or Autopistas, which were not speculative and didn’t depend on the economic cycle. We’ve gone from the strongest savings banks in Europe, which low level politicos called an “economic miracle” with unmerited optimism, to major surgery, as if saving banks engaged in elephant hunts with King Juan Carlos. All politicians are to blame, not just Narcis Serra. Saving banks in Valencia, Castile, Andalusia, everywhere, have fallen through their monumentalism and political corruption. La Caixa survived the assault by Catalan President Jordi Pujol. Caixa Catalunya resisted for decades until falling into the hands of the socialists. A saving bank is a very delicate institution. Politicians didn’t have the common sense to manage with orthodoxy. They preferred wild expansion throwing away the money of depositors. Saving banks are obliged to be very conservative because they never had enough capital. They believed they were banks when they didn’t have the resources. European liberalization made them heady and, unlike banks, they went on a crazed expansion. But a divorce law does not force you to divorce and liberalization does not oblige you to open new branches. Catalan saving banks, which control 68% of Catalan savings, have half their branches outside Catalonia, in the rest of Spain. They lost their territoriality much before going under. The expansion of branches and deals deteriorated their de-capitalisation even more. The crisis gave the coup de grace. They started looking for capital like Valenti Castanys joked about an ad in the Civil War: “Collectivized firm seeks capitalist partner.” The end of the process will be that saving banks are just banks. “We don’t have the bourgeoisie we used to have” Serra Ramoneda ended saying, “Look at football clubs, the Palau de la Musica or the saving banks, how they have changed.”